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Possum Living
Category:Fargo Filmmaking Wiki Category:Title Possum Living is a 29-minute documentary directed by Nancy Schreiber. Main Details In the late '70s, 18-year-old Dolly Freed wrote a lil' volume entitled Possum Living: How to Live Well Without a Job and With (Almost) No Money. An anti-work manifesto + homesteading/frugal living how-to guide, the tome extols the virtues of roadkill consumption, offers some practical advice for making realtors come around to your point of view and offers some delicious turtle recipes to boot. In a word (or two) the book is awesome. Now, after reading the book, lots of folk resort to the tired "Living without work? Impossible! She must be lying" excuse as some sad attempt to justify their own morbid participation in the 9-5 death grind. That's where this documentary comes in. Unlike Bob Black who wrote hollow polemics denouncing work (http://www.zpub.com/notes/black-work.html) while taking a break from calling the cops on people, Dolly actually practiced what she espoused, and this documentary shows it. Plot Summary A couple years after the book was published, Nancy Schreiber--who had done the cinematography for Am I Normal? A Film About Male Puberty the previous year, took a camera and a small crew to visit Dolly & her pa Frank. And guess what? There was Dolly, raisin' rabbits in her cellar, fixin' up houses, and makin' turtle stew. In other words, doing exactly what she described in her book. So much for the 'you're a fraud' accusations from the wage- slaves. Now here are some quotes: Nancy Schreiber, director says: "I was intrigued at the ingenuity of the 20-year-old young woman, Dolly Freed, who along with her Dad, had created a lifestyle of raising their own vegetables and rabbits. They got wheat from the feed and grain store during the years of double-digit inflation. Dolly had been pulled from the school system when she was 11 years old, and taught by her father. I found her, because she wrote a book about her lifestyle and even found a publisher in New York. I was struck by her confidence and know- how after being self-taught and living reclusively in the country." Pauline Bonnie Rogers, in More Contemporary Cinematographers on their Art, writes: "Schreiber followed Dolly to California, to appear on the Merv Griffin Show. She raised all the money and ended up distributing the film through a collective of social issue filmmakers called New Day Films, which is still in existence today. "I worked with a very small crew, one sound, one AC, a Production Manager, a PA, and myself, she recalls. "I had minimal lighting equipment, since there was hardly any power in Dolly's home. We didn't have the luxury of high=speed stock and super -speed lenses then, either. The stock was 7247 (Kodak), and I used an Eclair NRP with an Angenieus 9.5-57 zoom." The film went on to win numerous awards, a blue ribbon at the American Film Festival. Janet Maslin gave it a wonderful review in the New York Times when it played with a Lee Grant documentary on the Wilmar Eight at the prestigious New Directors-New Films at MOMMA. "I made the film really as a way to show the world I could shoot," Schreiber explains. Schreiber certainly comes off as self-serving (in the intro to the documentary she implies that her interest in making the film arose from her being "intrigued that this family had chosen not to work when so many people today are unemployed or worried about making ends meet. If financial security didn't matter to Dolly and Frank, then what was important...?" whereas in the interview above she states that "made the film really as a way to show the world I could shoot"...in other words she didn't have the interest for Dolly, but just wanted to capitalize on what was becoming a popular book), but it's still a good documentary, if only for the fact that it shows that Dolly was totally legit. Janet Maslin, New York Times, April 24, 1981, writes: "''Possum Living, like The Willmar 8, includes footage of its subjects on a television talk show. The Willmar strikers were interviewed by Phil Donahue, who added a bit of confrontational theater by telephoning the bank president while on the air. Dolly Freed, the subject of Possum Living, turns up on The Merv Griffin Show and cuts a much more curious figure. Miss Freed's special talent is for living on next to nothing, raising rabbits in her basement, growing vegetables in her garden and finding other necessities as cheaply as she can. But she has written a book about this, which makes her something of a celebrity. So in thrift shop clothing, she turns up for her talk show appearance and trades tips on frugality with the makeup man. Then she sits down next to Merv. This juxtaposition alone is worth the price of admission.'' Aside from being an engrossing compendium of Dolly's household hints (she buys grain and potatoes in bulk from the feed store and eats a lot of rabbit meat), ''Possum Living is an arrestingly bizarre portrait. Miss Schreiber has a gift for understatement that works nicely with the eccentric aspects of Dolly's life. For instance, Dolly lives alone with her father, and both are visited by Dolly's mother, a greatly overweight woman who is in the artistic candle business and who has since remarried. You'll never be the cook your mother was, says Dolly's mother, sitting down for one of Dolly's dinners. Meanwhile, Dolly's position as Daddy's little girl goes just as charitably unexamined as this rivalry with her mother. But the camera duly records it all. Possum Living is full of fondness and respect for its subject's determination to be an original. Like the Willmar 8, Dolly Freed comes across as someone whose very break with convention amounts to a heroism of sorts, however unexpected.''" Essentially though, the book's success and the documentary itself proved to be Dolly's ruin, not unlike those Amish kids that get drunk during Rumspringa and never come back to their clan: "After the book came out Dolly and Frank banked the ten thousand and she went on her publicity tour: TV, radio, newspapers, magazines. Dolly visited Schreiber, the documentary filmmaker, in New York and stayed in her downtown loft--they went to parties and to dinners, and Dolly learned to hail taxis by watching how New Yorkers did it. She missed home and her garden yet thought, 'I can get around in the world. I can do this.'" Dolly went to college, got a job (as a NASA aeronautics engineer), got married, had kids, etc... She's lately been in the spotlight again, as a new version of Possum Living (with all the not so politricaly correct parts now apparently either redacted or adjoined with legalist denouncements) was reissued this year, so there's been the rekindled (somewhat hollow) publicity about it. Vice did an interview with her: http://www.viceland.com/int/v17n1/htdocs/live-freed-or-die-298.php/ Anyway, if you want to hear about Dolly now in 2010--30 years after Possum Living--there's a long expose by Paige Williams here: http://www.paige-williams.com/ and you can read some surviving entries on Dolly's blog here: http://web.archive.org/web/20101222104644/http://possumliving.net/blog/ which, while still containing entries about making pigeon stew and such, is nonetheless obviously part of the publicity campaign for the book, *sigh*. Plot Summary Production Information Cast * Dolly Freed.... Herself Crew * Nancy Schreiber.... Director Other Information Film Festivals * 2010 Free Range Film Festival External Links * Possum Living at Vimeo